The summer I was nine years old, my parents split up. I was packed off to my grandmother's. She lived on a farm. There was a dependency house on the property where hired help stayed. At the time it was empty, so to keep me distracted--and out of her hair, Grandma hung a quilting frame in the main room of the dependency. The frame was about 85 x 180 inches when extended fully. To me, it looked like the rack of a torturers chamber.

Grandma had me help her assemble the *quilt* to ready it for the quilting stitches. The bottom layer of the *quilt* was laid down on the floor...this one was white muslin...then a cotton quilting batting was unrolled over this, followed by the pieced top layer. We knelt on the floor, doing large tacking stitches evenly over the whole quilt to hold the three layers together..taking stitches about every 6 inches.

Grandma lowered the frame and we carefully attached the *quilt* to the frame. She stood on one side, I on the other of the frame and we stretched the *quilt* carefully all the way around. Then, she sat at one side and showed me how to carefully take tiny stitches. Holding the large quilting needle perfectly perpendicular to the stretched *quilt*, it was pushed through the three layers from the top with one hand, gathered from beneath with the other, then had to be pushed back up through all three layers(perfectly straight).

She did one whole pattern so that I could copy it. The artistry was in the quilting stitches, not just the piecing of colorful scraps. She did a pattern that was typical to her family.

As a row was completed, the quilt was rolled up. One bar of the frame could be loosened and rolled to the other side, row of stitching by row of stitching. Grandma came by to check on my progress throughout the morning...until the day grew too hot for me to work in the closed up space. If my stitches were too big (about 1/16 of an inch was correct) or I had deviated from the swirled heart and flower pattern of the quilting, I had to take out the stitches and start over from the last pattern.

I also had to use short lengths of thread on my needle...this was a cardinal rule, only beginners tried to use long threads in their needles....or worse, fools--according to grandma. So she checked to see where my tie-off knots were...how close together they were and how inconspicuous I had made them.

It took me all summer to do half the quilt. I thought I was free of the quilt at last when school started---then I had a school holiday , which was spent at the farm. Until the quilt was finished, I spent half of each vacation day at the farm bent over the quilting frame. I hated that quilt. Then, when I got married, grandma gave me the quilt and I cried as I ran my fingers over the slightly shaky stitches and remembered how proud grandma and I had been over the accomplishment and the closeness that had grown between us. But, I have never quilted another quilt and I probably will never ever do another.

And, just think, women made all the quilts for the family in the old days...and quilts wear out---new ones have to be made.

...... E'by